Creating a decadent, insane, and depressed robot from Internet ramblings

Have you ever wondered what a Tumblr written by a psychotic robot would look like? Wonder no more, because [Lars] has that all figured out.

A few years ago, [Lars] stumbled across lowbrow.com (now defunct, but mirrored here), an online confessional and bathroom wall meant to host people’s most private thoughts and actions anonymously. [Lars] wrote a script to pull a random lowbrow post down every minute and threw every unique result into a database.

With about 50 pages of the most depraved and depressing posts of questionable veracity, [Lars] trained a Markov chain algorithm to produce paragraphs that imitated the style of lowbrow contributors. This gave [Lars] pages of computer-generated text describing the most decadent, depressing, insane, inane, but overwhelmingly human experiences possible. A few choice quotes from the output are:

The llama: nature’s random number generator.

Over 7000 watts of Ol’ Barry whining his ass cheeks to soften the blows.

All through school I was being pulled behind the local St. Benedictine Monastary where I was afraid I don’t know what I thought was the founder pulls back from a discussion about homestarrunner.com

While [Lars]’ script wouldn’t pass a Turing test, we’ve met people who couldn’t do the same. As far as creating a real-life version of Hedonism Bot, HAL, and Marvin from Hitchhiker’s Guide, we’re thinking [Lars] hit the mark.

After the break you can check out a gallery of pics [Lars] put together of from his computer-generated text. You can also grab the full lowbrow corpus and the ruby script to build your robotic [Kerouac].

Anyone know of a similar Windows/DOS executable? Or at least something in C/C++/C#/VB(.NET)? I really don’t want to install another language just to try this. Ruby itself sounds like it was generated via Markov chain on several existing languages.

Check out Greg Leedberg’s Billy or DAISY software, chief. It works well, is customizable, and you can feed it text docs as well to learn from. I have been working with daisy for 8 years and have a chatbot that makes folks leave rooms and me blush quite frequently. It seems to be hung up on Romans raping mentally challenged youth. Don’t know what that is about lol.

would train the markov chain on foo.txt and bar.txt weighting input from foo.txt twice as much as input from bar.txt, and then once the training was complete generate a thousand output tokens to standard out.

markov.rb:19:in `initialize': No such file or directory - -w=100 (Errno::ENOE
NT)
from markov.rb:19:in `open'
from markov.rb:19:in `add_file'
from markov.rb:235:in `block in '
from markov.rb:234:in `each'
from markov.rb:234:in `'

One of the most interesting things to come out of this for me was the realization that running a body of text through this algorithmic blender will totally destroy what we would traditionally think of as meaning while eerily preserving the emotional content.

Quite some time ago I wrote a piece of Steganography software that used subtle statistical variations in Markov Chain generated text to hide messages in what appears to be random garbage text. In short, a “1” was encoded by the most likely statistical variation appearing in the text, and a “0” for the alternative.

PS. This is how you encode “Hello, World”, using The Book of Genesis from the KJV Bible as seed text:

Jahzeel, and replenish the fowl of every living creature after their hand of Hagar the land by his father, and Accad, and Calah, And they brought forth his voice, and she conceived, that Pharaoh for my power I pray you, saying, Jacob: all these words? God saw Rachel envied him. And I offended their possession: he and thou shalt thou in the sight because I shall be gone. And they might not toward Israel’s left communing with thy brethren, sons of the ark; And he could we may preserve seed of Pharaoh awoke. And Abram said to interpret it. And the nakedness of the earth. Make ready the word of the face to him a well; whose land ye shall tell me; that he saw that betwixt me swear, saying, He is Hiddekel: that I have made the tree, of Canaan.